“It would help if you laid down,” the paramedic said, and Nadine reluctantly angled her body back until her feet were planted on the floor and she was half-reclining, half-sitting, so he could rinse the(bite)wound with soap and sterile water. “Sorry—it’ll sting.”
“What were you doing in the mine in the first place?”
How much was safe to tell the sheriff? His family was close with the Cullravens and according to Deena, they had been for years.His pet lawyer, was what she had called Ephraim Crocker, and Nadine would have bet that was the great-grandfather who’d shot the deer mounted in his office.
Was Gideon Crocker in the pocket of the Cullravens like his great-grandfather had been?
Could she trust him?
Rael had warned her to stay out of his father’s way, and she wasn’t sure how much she could trust him either, even if he had been the one to save that poor wounded bird and tell her about Noelle’s freak-out in the square.
“Nadine.”
(Nadine)
“I—I got a note.” She stared at the exposed beams of the ceiling. “Someone asked me to meet them there. They told me they had information about Noelle,” she lied.
“And so you just decided to go ahead and do that, huh? Can I see this note, Miss Nancy?”
Ugh. She reached into the pocket of her capris, dipping into first one and then the other, but turned up nothing but old dryer fuzz. “It’s gone,” she said. “It must have fallen out in the mine.”
Or someone took it.Someone who didn’t want anyone to know that they’d been meeting you in the first place.
She looked up at his skeptical face. “There really was a note! I swear.”
Shit. It had been a hand-written note, too. Gideon probably would have recognized the handwriting. At the very least, he could have submitted it to an expert. They still had those right? She should have photographed it. Why could she neverthinkwhen it mattered?
“Those tunnels are off-limits for a reason,” Gideon said. “They’re dangerous. Your little adventure could have caused a cave-in—or worse.”
Nadine struggled to tear her mind away from her self-flagellatory thoughts about the note. “It wasn’t an adventure. I told you, someone asked me to meet me there. I was attacked. Don’t you care? Aren’t you going to do anything?”
“If someone did attack you, I’d say it was likely they were a vagrant.”
“But they knew my name!”
“Well, so you say.” But that stumped him for a moment. He looked at the EMT, who was trying hard to school his face and hide his interest. “Did you get a look at your attacker?”
“No. It was too dark. And someone hit me on the back of the head—ow.”
The EMT gave her a sympathetic grimace. “Human bites are nasty, so we gotta clean them. When they happen in bars, they often call ‘em ‘fight bites.’ If infection sets in, it can go right down to the bone.”
“Don’t scare the girl, Ramon. Jesus.” Gideon raised his eyes to the ceiling. “You sure someone hit you? Because from what I’m hearing it sounds like it happened something like this. You went into the mine thinking you’d take a look around. Maybe you were meeting someone and maybe you weren’t. But you tripped over something, or maybe knocked into a wall, and triggered a minor cave-in, which is how you landed yourself in the tunnels in the first place. And then, something bit you. Maybe it was a human. Maybe they really did know your name. And hell, maybe there was a note. But from where I’m standing all I have is your word. The real fact of the matter is, you were somewhere you knew you weren’t supposed to be.ThatI have proof of.”
“It is a human bite,” said the EMT. “You can tell by the bite pattern. The marks are parallel. Animals don’t have that kind of symmetry.”
Gideon looked annoyed. “All right. So it’s a human bite. So, what?”
“Someone moved the boards in the mine,” said Nadine. “There was a bit of white fabric caught on the splinters. Probably when they crawled through. Like Itoldyou. But I didn’t see their face. They—he—shone a light in my eyes to blind me.”
And then he touched me . . . everywhere.
“He.” Gideon latched onto the word. “So you did catch a glimpse of them?”
“N-no.” Nadine flushed and shifted uncomfortably.
“Well, I’ll be sure to have that checked out.” His tone was so dismissive that it felt like a slap. As far as she knew, nobody else worked for him and this was his not-so-subtle way of telling her to eat shit. “In the meantime, Nadine, you stay away from that mine. Understand? If I see you around this area again, I’ll arrest you for trespassing and you can cool your heels in the county jail.”
“But—”
